Thursday May 20, 2010 6:34 pm

What is Google TV? Straight from Google

Earlier this morning at the Google I/O event, a major portion was dedicated to the announcement of Google TV. Google TV is basically a software layer that lets you find content to watch on your television. It’s build on Android, Chrome, and Flash, and lets you control things like live TV, as well as giving you the full power of the Internet. You can throw TV into a picture-in-picture box to fire up a web browser, search YouTube, pull up Hulu, or really just about anything else that you can do in a browser. Google Search sits on top of everything, and can be pulled up at any time. When you do a search, it will pull results from the web, as well as from TV listings, giving you the ability to find whatever you want to watch. If you like a show, channel, or search, you can save that as a bookmark for easy access later.

The interesting thing here is the integration with Android. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are mandatory in the Google TV hardware, which will be built by partners. That means that you can use an Android handheld device, pull up a website, and just beam it right over to Google TV. You can also perform a voice search on the device, and have that search carried out on the TV. Eliminating the frustrating tap-typing that we are all so tired of when it comes to searching on a big screen like a television? That is fairly awesome. Oh, and since Google TV runs Android, that also means that it runs apps as well. You get complete access to the Android market.

Take a look at the video above for a simple explanation of what Google TV is all about. You can expect to see devices shipping, like a Logitech set-top box, that will give you Google TV capabilities, later this year in the fall.